N°5. A number instead of a flower.

1921: a number as a name

In 1921 Ernest Beaux, a perfumer who had worked in Russia and was then living in France, presented Gabrielle Chanel with two series of samples. One was numbered 1 to 5, the other 20 to 24. According to Nez magazine, Chanel chose sample number 5. The number became the name.

Until then, perfume names usually told a story: a flower, a person, a place, a feeling. A number tells no story. It only records a position in a row.

Perhaps the number was kept for a very simple reason. Its effect was large: the person smelling is not told in advance what they will smell. They have to smell for themselves.

In the history of perfume it was a step back from storytelling. And a step closer to the smell itself.

Aldehydes: a smell no garden has

N°5 was not the first perfume with aldehydes. But according to Nez, Beaux used a blend of C11, unsaturated C11 and C12 aldehydes at about one percent, far more than earlier bottles. The high quality aldehydes came from the Givaudan plant in Lyon, which had produced them since 1920.

Fatty aldehydes smell harsh when concentrated. Diluted, they feel dry, waxy and clean, like soap or cloth dried in the sun. They resemble no flower.

Nez also records that Beaux wanted to hold the cold freshness of northern waters under the midnight sun. If so, the first image behind N°5 was not a garden. It was a cold landscape.

Beneath the aldehydes is a large bouquet, jasmine, rose, ylang ylang, over woods and musk. But the bouquet is not drawn clearly. It is veiled in light, like an overexposed photograph. N°5 became the landmark of the floral aldehydic branch.

An abstract smell in the age of abstract painting

In the early twentieth century European painting was letting go of the figure. In 1915 Kazimir Malevich showed his Black Square in Petrograd. Piet Mondrian moved step by step towards blocks of colour and straight lines. A painting no longer had to resemble something to be worth looking at.

N°5 was born in that climate. It is often called an abstract scent: a floral smell that resembles no flower, a bouquet with no outline. It does to flowers what painting was doing to landscape.

The name and the bottle point the same way. A number instead of a flower's name. A white label, black letters, no picture. Everything is reduced until only structure is left.

It is not pure coincidence. The 1920s were a time when people believed that taking away was also a way of making something new.

When an object becomes a sign

In 2012 the Museum of Arts and Design in New York included Ernest Beaux's Chanel N° 5 in The Art of Scent, alongside Jicky of 1889. The smell was placed in a museum with its maker's name and year, like a work of art.

The bottle has been looked at and photographed so often that it has become a familiar shape. In 1968 Irving Penn photographed three Chanel products in a picture titled only with a count, a brand and a city. That photograph, like the bottle, chose a dry, short way of naming.

When an object passes through enough years, it stops being only itself. It becomes a sign for an era. People see the outline of the bottle, or just hear the number, and think of a whole century.

In 2021 N°5 turned one hundred. The number is still a number. But it now carries a hundred years of memory from everyone who has smelled it.